


It that looks on tempests and is never shaken

by moodysky



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Writing & Publishing, Ambiguous Time, Artist John Laurens, How Do I Tag, I'm Bad At Tagging, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Writer Alexander Hamilton
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:54:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23519536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodysky/pseuds/moodysky
Summary: Alexander Hamilton is struggling to find the right words after his first bestselling novel and in his search for meaning he meets the only person that has ever been able to crack his soul open.This fic isn't dead, 2020 is just hard.[Enter John Laurens.]
Relationships: Alexander Hamilton/John Laurens
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	It that looks on tempests and is never shaken

Alexander Hamilton had never seen anything quite like it before. The dim neon light broke through the window of the old, dilapidated warehouse while enormous black shadows of the moths outside frantically moved from wall to wall as if they were following invisible commands and the air hung thick of chemicals and salt mixed with a faint note of tobacco, alcohol and regret while the wind seemed to silently whisper a song no human ear could understand through the broken window, its shards spread all over the place, covering the ground as if to warn anyone that dared to set a foot into this building, to leave and never come back unless they wanted to seriously injure their feet and destroy their shoes in that process. He had accidentally stumbled across the seemingly empty, and most importantly open warehouse on one of his many late night walks through the industrial area of the city, away from all the glamorous billboards and the noisy nightlife filled with people and their loud voices shouting over the everlasting buzz, the sound of thousands of lives giving in to the night and its darkness.

He knew a lot of these warehouses were owned by rich fuckers that had too much money to spend or care and got away with it by buying overpriced, pretentious art that inspires you to think “I could do that” for millions of dollars that they then stored away in some godforsaken place where it would never see the light of day ever again to get a huge tax cut, while he, a mere mortal, had spent most of his time sleeping on friends of friends' couches until he wore out their rent-paying roommate’s welcome unable to scratch together enough money to think – or survive – past tomorrow. Alexander had just graduated from college a few months ago and all he had, all he owned, all he was, was debt. A big, hungry, growing larger every moment mountain of debt ready to swallow him whole and he probably would not witness the day on which it was going to be paid, if it ever was.

Up until this point he had been living in an industrial loft with high and equally red brick walls and one single window at a theatre major’s who had graduated three years earlier that had no heat or running water, which was probably neither safe nor legal to live in, but he was broke and it was fine. It had been fine, it was summer after all. And he didn't have to fear fires because a company that manufactured fire extinguishers and all the chemicals you could possibly need put out a chemical fire worked right across the street. And the smell of spices hung in the air to distract from all those chemicals because the spice factory had their place of business down the street and he could exactly tell what they were working on at every hour of the day whenever he opened the one window. Not that you would ever want to do that. He also had a rat, but that wasn’t a problem because he had a cat, his name was King George III. And George would climb up the old, time-worn sofa that had seen so many years the floral pattern it used to have had been replaced by a sickish green probably before Alexander was born, to look out of the window and imagine all the foreign lands he could conquer, telling stories about the world outside. If there ever was indisputable evidence of the meaninglessness of it all, it was probably hiding somewhere within that one-bedroom apartment that barely even had a kitchen sink.

That theatre major went on to have a major breakdown and went missing not shortly after. The landlady later told him after a prolonged investigation she conducted because they had been behind on several rent payments that he had resurfaced in a religious cult. Alexander had written it down into his shabby small notebook in the unlikely case he could ever draw inspiration from it for one of his stories. It really wasn't as romantic as it sounded, but that was most of life for him anyway. Same old, same old. And even though he had studied and graduated from a literature and arts program to become a writer, his drafts had been mostly rejected by all the publishers and editors he had sent them to – only small pieces of writing that lost themselves in short story collections and had barely paid enough to afford another month of rent and food. It wasn't easy getting published and he knew all about it, he had actually made a joke and tried to write a book on it. It had been rejected.

The worst part about rejection wasn’t actually the rejection. It was the waiting. The waiting for something inevitable to not-happen, while he paced back and forth restlessly in the tiny loft that could sparsely be called an apartment like a trapped animal in a small cage waiting to be executed at any moment. Here’s a thing he had learned throughout his life: it doesn’t hurt less if you see it coming. For whatever reasons people tell themselves that knowing it makes it easier – it doesn’t. Most publishers didn’t even bother replying to his script, telling him he had been rejected; he couldn’t blame them for it but it made things so much worse. The utter lack of closure was torture, it was fingernails scratching over a black board, for all he knew.

The landlady eventually kicked him out because an unpublished author with no money is nothing more than a idealist with no dream, it doesn’t get you anywhere, which was at least a major part of the reason why he was dragging his feet across the docks that night trying to open up random warehouses in the hope of finding a place to stay for the night – and those to come. And somehow, he ended up being lucky that day because some poor security guard, who would surely lose his job leaving his wife and two children destitute if anyone ever found out, he had left the storage unit 177-VI unlocked. Alexander slowly pushed the door open under the faint light of the cloudless night and the one flickering neon tube, until the gap was wide enough for him to sneak through before he pulled the door shut, praying to every higher power he knew of to not lock him inside.

It took a few seconds for his eyes to get used to the complete darkness before he found the light switch. The huge insides were lit by a single old lightbulb in the entrance area that surely wouldn’t pass any energy efficiency requirements the state had introduced years ago. He was taken back by the sheer size and emptiness of the warehouse, only able to make out small shapes of boxes or furniture. The dust had settled on every surface like a thick coat, disguising the shape and colour of everything that had once been underneath it, leaving an empty shell of grey as a testimony to the humans that had once built and then abandoned it, time had turned it into dust and it had become its own world. Only the shattered glass on the ground indicated that there had at least been some kind of change in that place over the course of the past years but that didn’t stop him from wandering around, cautiously avoiding getting any of the shards stuck in his already worn out and thinly soled shoe.

Now, Alexander Hamilton wasn’t the type to thoughtlessly trespass and invade more of a stranger's property than necessary, but even in that moment it didn't take him long to understand that among all the existing storage units along the docks he had ended up in the possibly greatest because against all odds this one wasn’t filled to the brink with crates or containers of some big international company – its purpose had been to store but a single canvas that leaned against a wall in the back.

And this was the place where he would encounter a piece of John Lauren’s soul for the first time.

Later he would tell himself it was the colours that pulled him in like an irresistible force and forced him onto his knees. Or something about the textures that juxtaposed perfectly with how the world felt around him in that very moment. It unfolded in front of him, didn’t just suddenly fall into his head and dragged him down merciless waves like cement shoes. It slowly pulled him down, so he could get used to the pressure that was building up inside of him. However, that didn’t change the drowning aspect of it. It was bare, stripped down and opened up his ribcage, breaking whatever was in its way and all the pain spilled out, every last drop of humanity was ripped out of him and laid on that canvas, tears running down his face and the words spinning, swirling through his head, his fingers trembling, desperately searching for something to grip, to hold onto. Nothing. It had torn him open.

No, it must have been the colours.

He was drowning, he didn’t realize at the time, but he was drowning and burning from the inside out at the same time.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, thank you for reading!  
> Criticism, comments and nitpicks are always welcome.
> 
> ps.: if you're currently having a bad time visit somegoodnews.com :)  
> pps.: if anyone has tagging advice I would greatly appreciate it. I have no idea how to tag.


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